Serpent F110 General instructions

9 October 2013
The SERPENT F110 has been out for a few months now and with 2 months of racing with the F1
under my belt. WHAT has the F1 revealed.
Let me throw a card on the table here before I go further into the write up. With the car being new
things will start to appear that may have not appeared in prototypes and now with more cars and
drivers out there, with their input also into the car, things will change to better the F110 and this will
happen with any brands first version of their chassis, this is called development and the latest F1
platform SERPENT have supplied is a very good base to start with in durability and design for their
first production release
It is now widely documented on social media that ball ends and screws are loosening and in doing
so are making the car hard to set up with these small problems arising, and I tend to agree with a
lot that is said. The manual states to use thread lock in areas and this should be followed to the
letter to save unwanted drama’s hindering your driving experience with the car. I generally refrain
from thread locking things in place and this has bit me in on-road a few times now and changed
my mind completely in this area.
The F1 itself is very easy to drive in box set up form with the 180mm standard width and now the
upgrade 200mm is available if you wish to convert which will indeed make cornering speeds higher,
the part numbers are for the full upgrade are (at this stage no photos available):
#411313 Front set wide F110
and spare arm set
#411314 Suspension arm L+R wide carbon F110
for now I’ll stick with 180mm as I’m happy with it performance, later down the track I will give the
200mm a run and see the difference when more familiar the affect of set up changes on the car.
I’ll now proceed to go through things that have arisen and the solutions I have come up with to
better my driving experience with the F110.
All the F1 kits I have built and driven so far have needed some kind of personal touches and I
found the SERPENT F110 no different in this area, In saying this though, if I had followed the rule
of “THREAD LOCK “, some of the problems may have not happened but they did and that is not
anything against the F1 itself.
The first thing to rear its head was the loosening of the side link ball screws. This is fixed by simply
giving the screw a little more thread bite in the ball itself done just by using a M3x8mm flat head
screw instead of the factory M3x6mm, doing this still leaves room for your 2.5 hex tool to grab so
you can tighten the screw up, also using my preferred thread lock PERMATEX blue holds well and
removes easier than red ... SOLVED

Next was the plastic nut in the steering pivot ball
,
this would loosen as the day went on and would create erratic behaviour in the steering, I removed
the plastic nut and placed Teflon tape around it, trimmed off all excess and screwed it back into
place and this fixed it beautifully ... SOLVED

Next was again loosening screws in the pivot balls in the front end suspension links, and in the
bulkhead, now the pivot balls at the rear where they attach to the servo mount were loosening
during race day and was fixed simply using thread lock to get me through the day.

(Thread lock is not a manual instruction and the reason I see is that this is the point where roll
centre is changed loctite would impede quick changes and the risk of stripping the hex???) So
when I got home I removed the ball cleaned it up and resecured it with a small pressure washer
(slit washer)
The front bulk head pivot balls are another thing all together
the use of the set screw and ball doesn’t leave much for the thread to bite into the bulk head and
with kerb hopping and accidents they pull out, so the solution here is using a 2mm drill bit, drill the
hole straight through top of the bulk head only giving it simply more thread bite, you can either use

a longer set screw and attach the same way or replace the factory equipment with 4.8mm ball
ends as I have. The ball end I used is 1mm higher than standard (Remember using spacers under
the standard pivot ball changers roll centre) which in turn changed the roll centre and actually
helped, giving me (I felt) more on power steering.
The chassis screws in the bulk head were starting to do the same thing so I started to use thread
lock but with re-tightening and them stripping the thread it was hopeless trying to keep them tight,
so I purchased a new bulk head and again drilled the bottom holes just a little more and placed a
M3 x 18mm flat head screw instead of the factory M3 x 16mm again to get that little more bite into
the plastic

After these few alterations the F1 was ready to hit the track. I started to go harder in the springs to
see if this helped with my driving style and alas it didn’t help me at all so then I started to play
around with the softer springs and this is where things started to come together.
As it stands now the side springs are back to standard with no torque on the side links and
completely free movement. Front springs are RIDE Soft’s, rear shock oil is AE45wt, standard soft
spring ride height is 4.8mm front with the RIDE spring and the rear is still at 5mm using the
standard rear height adjuster 0/20.
Enjoy your F1
Will